Tying a big conspiracy bow over some wonderfully shiney wrapping paper, we have our new drama in World of Warcraft care of an unscheduled and unexplained transfer of an entire or partial guild from the Uther server to the Eldre’Thalos server.
There are some enlightening forum threads here and here.
There’s a bit of an interesting wrinkle in that the guild in question has a relatively important member: Lum’s wife. You can see Lum talking about the heretofore innocent association at AFKGamer’s comments area.
If anyone can find Mulder, I’m too busy picturing Scully in some fantasy RPG inspired outfit…
I think it’s probably a pretty safe assumption that lots of folk aren’t willing to wade through a maze of threads on the always relatively low quality signal to noise ratio blizzard boards. I’m assuming the problem is that apparently blizzard moved a guild onto one of the recently opened up servers and is being hush-hush about it?
What’s scary is how strict Blizzard is being about not even wanting people to discuss it. Apparently open discussion of “disciplinary matters” is not allowed under the code of conduct.
What seems unclear is whether this guild was moved because they were being assholes (in which case moving them to another realm seems to be a pretty lame punishment) or because they were being hassled somehow on their exisitng server. Either way I don’t see how this is going to work out well for either the guild in question or Blizzard in light of the community outrage that this seems to have sparked.
It definitely seems as though Blizzard has bent its own rules here; perhaps there was indeed some favoritism in play, which is why they’re being so coy about it.
From what I understand, the uproar is over the following set of facts:
Uther is a server that has been up since the game opened.
Eldre’Thalas is a server that has been up for 2 months.
When Eldre’Thalas opened there were no server transfers to it – to join it meant having to start all over from level 1.
Uther has never had sever transfers – if you started on it your character had to stay there.
There were only handful of level 60s on Eldre’Thalas.
This guild gets transfered from Uther to Eldre’Thalas.
No announcement is made about them being transfered over.
Many of the members of this guild are level 60, throwing the balance between Horde and Alliance out of whack.
Now there are conflicting reports on why they were allowed to transfer. People from the guild said it was because they were testing the Character Transfer System. CS has since said that they were being harassed on Uther and were transfered as a disciplinary action against the rest of the server (Uther).
And now they are threatening suspensions for anyone talking about it. All in all, shady and unfair to the server they dumped them on. And another reason I’m not missing my account terribly much.
Edit: People have also been digging up posts that prove that when they were on Uther they certainly weren’t innocent and pure.
Official word has come down from on high, of a sort:
Due to the extreme volume of posts on this issue, I am posting this thread to consolidate the discussion. For this particular case alone, we are making an exception to the Disciplinary Action clause of the Code of Conduct, provided the discussion remains civil and constructive.
The guild Displaced was moved from Uther to Eldre’Thalas due to a harassment issue. However, due to the reactions of various groups, the action taken has come under further review. We will be releasing more information on the subject later today, including the resolution.
I ask that, until then, you remain patient and keep the discussion here in this thread. Thank you.
For once, I’m excited about reading the HRose rant on this one :P
Edit: The best part is probably Blizzard’s claim that the original guild transfer was envisioned as a test to their new character transfer system. Why they couldn’t use some dummy characters, we’ll never know.
I find it fun just because Lum is involved and I know how much he pays attention to avoid drama in every way and, still, he always finish to drown in it.
But I’m not really interested to comment the efficency of GMs and thelike. I don’t find that really exciting. Just problems of management when you have to deal with a so large public.
I don’t think it’s fair to say they “neglected to admit fault.” They apologized for screwing up. Twice. Which doesn’t change the fact that they were dumbasses for doing this to begin with, and dumbasses times 100–verging on outright malevolent–for trying to stifle any discussion of it on the boards.
Sorry, they neglected to assign blame. It’s more of an “a mistake was made by an unnamed party” than an “I fucked up”. That’s probably decent corporate policy, not selling out your employees and all. The players aren’t gonna like it though.
They did neglect to admit fault and they also were not completely truthful with respect to the explanation.
This happened because one of the guys in the guild that got moved knew someone at Blizzard. Period. THAT was the real issue. It was not coincidence that that particular guild got moved.
The only “evidence” likely to seep out to the public is on Jenning’s blog here http://www.brokentoys.org/?p=6748 but there’s not much motivating Blizzard CS or Jennings to open up about that. Maybe olaf could subpoena them :wink:
